I fooled around with OC without utilities today. I did geekbench test on stock settings and came out with a score around 960. Went in to and upped the multiplier to 45 slowly and ran prime95 for about 20 minutes without any trouble(max temps 64, average at 60 on all cores). Tried with multiplier at 46 and it wouldn't boot. Am gonna fool with the voltage once I have a little better idea of what I'm doing. Redid the geekbench and my score went up to 12240! Not that that means anything to me. I know that 20 minutes of prime95 blend is not "stable" but i figured that would be long enough to tell me that the system was stable as far at multiplier goes.

Anyway, decided on a corsair k90 keyboard, corsair m60 mouse, and a set of highly rated/value plantronics 7.1 surround headphones.

Who wants to talk me through messing with all the voltage settings? lol

It is still in the works, waiting on 2 more fittings Performance PCs just "forgot" to send.

As for your temps, 55-60C w/ ambient temps of 72F is what I shoot for.

What are your volts currently at? I found my 3570K liked 1.24V when @ 4.5Ghz but then my 3770K likes 1.28V when @ 4.5Ghz.

Somewhere between/around is where you should probably be.

IMO if you can run Prime95 for 1.5-2hrs, you are good. For a 24/7 stable rig ppl only run prime for 12hrs, I think that is fckking ridiculous on a rig we aren't using 24/7.. it isn't a folder just a gaming PC.

well initially my bios voltage was set to auto and 100x45 which ran blend on prime95 for 15 minutes or so with a max temp of 65 on all cores. didn't fool with the voltage last night.

today, changed my Vcore to fixed at 1.2 with 100x45. booted but blue screened with errors almost immediately with prime.

next, went ahead and took vcore up to 1.25 an 100x45. Been running prime for almost a half hour already without problems. Coretemp is showing my VID as 1.231-1.236 though. not sure what thats about. Here are my temps at intervals so far.

update: at one hour and temps have just cycled back and forth between those sets of value previously listed. max temps have not changed.

as I said before, the on board utility had me at about 4.7ghz. With the bios autoregulating the voltage my temps were lower at the same clock. I am thinking at 1.25v I could squeeze some more multiplier out of it. Will let it run for another couple hours during MNF and see what happens.

okay redid the OC with offset rather than fixed and was able to get better control over voltages and temps. Turned off C3 and C6 states. Ran some really short prime testing to get a baseline multiplier of 46. 47 wouldn't run prime for 5 minutes so I dialed back to 46 and started messing with turbo voltage.

Temps were monitored in Coretemp and verified accurate by realtemp. VID was only available in Coretemp. LLC was set to level 2(on asrock yields minimal vdroop).

I found that prime has different sets of tests that it cycles through which stress the cpu differently. It seemed to run a light stress and then heavy stress over and over. Therefore, I stopped the test at just over 2 hours as temps weren't really going to vary much. I had previously gone for 4.7Ghz with turbo voltage as high as +.027. This pushed VID as high as 1.256. Temps on stressful sets would touch 85C which was not acceptable to me. I dropped to 4.6Ghz and started walking the turbo voltage back down.

Parameters for an acceptable OC(not final, more on that in a minute) are overall avg temp of 70 and not to exceed 84 at any point. No fatal errors on any core for 2 hours.

Interpretation: This OC profile was stable enough for normal/gaming computing. I put much more stock in the avgs than the max as the max was not sustained at any point. Overall avg 68-74. Something else to not is that Core0 ran significantly cooler (5-8C) than the hottest core. C3 also ran a little cooler(1-2C) than cores 1 and 2.

I plan to continue to was the turbo voltage down and hopefully get overall averages in the range of 66-72. Will also pursue stability of approx 6 hours. I may actually end up scaling back to 4.5Ghz.

yeah maybe it's like 70-72F in here. I'm in a loft. Cooler is noctua nh-d14. It ran like 3 hours stable at 4.6Ghz when I turned turbo down to +.16 with temps a couple degrees cooler than my previous post.

I went ahead and turned the turbo to auto and left the offset at +.005 and turned down the clock to 4.5Ghz. I am not going to get bent out of shape about 100Mhz. Been running 45 minutes with temps avg 61-68 on lower stress sets and 72-76 on high stress sets(hottest core). Max temp is 78 and was momentary.

Will either turn down the offset or up the clock if this stays stable for another hour.